The present technique relates to the field of data processing. More particularly, it relates to prefetching of instructions to a cache in a data processing apparatus.
A data processing apparatus may have an instruction cache for storing instructions. When an instruction needs to be executed by processing circuitry, it is fetched from the cache. If an instruction to be executed is not in the cache, then it is fetched from memory, but this may delay processing. To improve performance, a prefetcher may be provided to prefetch instructions into the cache before they are actually needed by the processing circuitry. To predict which instructions are likely to be executed in the future by the processing circuitry, most known prefetchers require a reasonably large amount of tracking data generated based on past instruction accesses. The present technique seeks to provide a more efficient prefetching technique.